Frankie

by Graham Norton ★★★☆☆

Frankie, the latest offering from talk show host and author Graham Norton, follows the fictional life of Frankie Howe, from her time as a girl growing up in West Cork, Ireland, to her eventual moves to London, the United States, and back to London. We meet Frankie in old age; she's taken a fall, and her friend Nor has hired a young night nurse named Damian to help Frankie in her home as she rehabilitates from her injury. Damian and Frankie strike up a friendship, and Frankie begins to share her life story over cups of tea as they chat late into the evenings.

On the British cover of the novel, the tagline is "You should be the main character in your own life, but Frankie never was." It's a strange choice, and not something that would cause me to pick up the book. I don't think it's entirely accurate, but I understand the intention: in most instances, Frankie is at the mercy of others. Whether it's an arranged marriage, a male-dominated culture (much of the novel takes place between 1950 and 1980), friends more confident or more worldly than her, or a domineering boss, Frankie seems to allow fate and the machinations of others to carry her along rather than charting her own destiny. She's sweet, innocent, and inherently good, and so the reader naturally wants to see her succeed. Unfortunately, that innocence leads to challenges and her being manipulated or taken advantage of more often than not.

Speaking of challenges, Frankie encounters her share of them, but they are generally things that simply happen to her. What that leaves is a void where I would have preferred there be some tension and anticipated direction for the story. We putter along as Frankie recounts what happens to her, but there is no overarching goal (besides Frankie finding her way to happiness) and limited foreshadowing. Because Frankie's course is most often at the mercy of others' decisions, there's no targeted achievement, or impending conflict, or chartered journey we can look forward to or pitfalls we can nervously hope she avoids. As readers, we just wait to see what happens next, which is fine, but it never had me rushing back to see if Frankie would make it.

There are some challenges I had with portions of the novel. They're hard to relay without spoiling significant plot points, but suffice it to say that Frankie's sexual awakening seems to happen out of nowhere, and I struggled with some of Norton's choices near the end of the novel. There are a significant set of characters that are barely mentioned until they start to suffer (and die). They feel too much like strangers for the reader to be as emotionally impacted as I suspect Norton wants us to be.

I chose the audiobook for this one—after all, I always appreciate when an author reads their own work—but I actually think the novel would have been better served by a different narrator. Norton does a fine job writing a believable female character, and while his performance of the audiobook is perfectly fine, a novel told from a female's point of view and in which 80% of the dialogue is from women deserved to have a female narrator. If you choose to read this one, choose print.

Overall, Frankie was...fine. There was nothing especially wrong with the novel; but there wasn't a ton that was right, either. Despite a few memorable moments, this was mostly ho-hum and forgettable for me.